Turkey’s drug seizures reveal a much larger trafficking pipeline under political protection

Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm

When Turkey’s trade minister, Ömer Bolat, addressed the Turkish Parliament’s Budget and Planning Committee on November 5, his remarks were crafted to signal a state firmly in control.

“This year we seized 40.118 billion lira worth of narcotics, weighing 30 tons and 100 kilograms,” he proclaimed, citing customs enforcement’s operations at Turkey’s borders. On paper, the figure appeared impressive. In reality, it represented only a narrow slice of the narcotics flow crossing Turkish territory.

Bolat’s number covered seizures made exclusively at border gates monitored by the trade ministry. It did not include the far larger volume of drugs intercepted by police, gendarmes and coast guard units inside the country. The data captured in the Turkey’s 2025 narcotics report (Türkiye Uyuşturucu Raporu), which was published by the interior ministry paints a far more expansive picture of Turkey’s role in global trafficking.

According to the national report, Turkey logged 309,028 drug incidents in 2024 and detained 374,948 suspects. The combined volume of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, skunk, methamphetamine and synthetic cannabinoids seized nationwide reached approximately 105 metric tons, dwarfing customs’ border-only totals. Tablet seizures surged to 115.8 million pills, led by an unprecedented wave of synthetic pharmaceuticals, 94.7 million tablets in a single year, followed by 15.9 million Captagon pills and 5.1 million ecstasy tablets.

Methamphetamine, a drug once peripheral in Turkey’s narcotics landscape, exploded to 33,833 kilograms, marking the highest meth haul in Turkish history. Cannabis and skunk reached 61,501 kilograms, heroin 4,346 kilograms, cocaine 3,082 kilograms and synthetic cannabinoids 2,491 kilograms. Each figure represented either sustained growth or a record-breaking increase, with many categories rising sharply year-on-year.

Yet even this vast national dataset represents only the visible tip of an expanding and increasingly diversified trafficking ecosystem. Global research institutions and enforcement bodies such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the RAND Corporation (RAND) and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) converge on a single finding: no state, regardless of capability, intercepts more than 5 to 10 percent of the narcotics being trafficked.

In high-volume transit countries with sprawling container ports, porous borders and entrenched corruption, interception rates often fall to 3 percent or even lower.

Read through that prism, Turkey’s 105-ton total does not represent the size of the drug economy; rather, it represents the size of the state’s blind spot. If Turkey had seized 10 percent of trafficking volume, more than 1,000 tons of narcotics would have moved through or into the country last year. If the seizure rate was closer to 5 percent, the flow would have exceeded 2,000 tons. In scenarios consistent with Turkey’s logistical, political and geographic vulnerabilities, the true figure may approach or exceed 3,000 tons.

And this is where the structural realities of Turkey’s political environment become impossible to ignore.

Drug trafficking in Turkey operates in a permissive atmosphere nurtured over two decades by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its unofficial ultranationalist coalition partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The MHP’s long and well-documented entanglements with mafia figures and nationalist paramilitary nodes, structures that date back to Turkey’s Cold War-era deep-state operations, have created a political environment in which organized crime has not only survived but expanded.

Under the AKP–MHP partnership, these networks have enjoyed unprecedented proximity to political power. The coalition secured the release of notorious mafia bosses and organized crime figures who had been serving long prison sentences, while politically connected Turkish operatives assisted international drug traffickers and underworld leaders in settling in Turkey and laundering their proceeds through the Turkish financial and banking systems with impunity.

Despite dramatic press statements and periodic publicized raids, Turkey has never mounted a serious, sustained crackdown on upper-tier narcotics trafficking. Investigations overwhelmingly target low-level street dealers, addicts or small distributors, while major traffickers, port-linked facilitators, money launderers and politically connected intermediaries remain largely untouched.

High-level networks implicated in cocaine shipments, heroin corridors, methamphetamine logistics, Captagon trafficking and import-export laundering structures routinely escape scrutiny. Those who possess political protection from the AKP-MHP establishment are left undisturbed, their operations intact, their logistics chains uninterrupted.

Political interference in police and prosecutorial investigations has become systemic. Cases that touch powerful business interests, politically connected port operators or nationalist crime syndicates are quietly shut down or reassigned. Prosecutors who press too far find their careers stalled or abruptly ended, while police units that pursue sensitive networks risk being purged.

This pattern became most visible during mass dismissals in 2016–2017, when thousands of veteran police chiefs, prosecutors and judges were removed en masse on fabricated charges by the Erdogan government. The purge created a pervasive climate of fear across the judiciary and law-enforcement branches. The result is an enforcement architecture that performs activity for public display while selectively blinding itself to the most consequential actors.

This selective blindness is amplified by Turkey’s geography, a convergence point for Afghan heroin, Latin American cocaine, Iranian meth and Syrian-Lebanese Captagon, and by its logistics network, which includes major container hubs like Mersin, Ambarlı, İzmit and Tekirdağ. Many of the world’s largest cocaine seizures with Turkish fingerprints have occurred abroad, not inside Turkey, revealing how foreign authorities, unconstrained by Turkish political pressures, frequently intercept what Turkish institutions overlook or allow to pass.

The precursor seizures listed in the national report drive the point home. While police and customs recorded only minimal quantities of chemicals such as acetic anhydride, ephedrine, acetyl chloride and toluene, the low numbers do not signal weak trafficking: They signal weak detection. In countries with growing synthetic-drug production or transit activity, precursor volumes should rise sharply. Their absence in Turkey’s statistics suggests that production and transit networks are functioning with little interference.

Minister Bolat’s border seizure total — 30 tons, hailed as a victory — offers a distorted picture of the landscape. When aligned with the nationwide figures and the global science of interdiction, his number does not reassure. It reveals just how much his ministry does not see, cannot control or does not want to confront.

The totality of the data leads to an unavoidable conclusion. Turkey is not seizing 30 tons of drugs, nor 100 tons, nor even a few hundred kilograms here and there. It is seizing a fraction of a narcotics pipeline that may span 1,000 to 3,000 tons annually, facilitated by geography, driven by profit and shielded by political alliances that have blurred the lines between state, party and the underworld.

Bolat’s remark in parliament was meant to broadcast strength. Instead, it pointed to a failure, one that is political as much as it is institutional. The real measure of Turkey’s drug problem is not the volume of narcotics the state intercepts but the vast quantities it does not, the criminal networks it refuses to touch and the political actors who benefit from the system remaining exactly as it is.